"When Science and Beliefs Collide -- A large and growing share of the
population rejects aspects of science."

By Janet Raloff. Science News,
Vol. 149 (June 8, 1996), pp. 360-361.

Raymond Eve first became interested in alternative ways of thinking about
science when he read about a Chicago woman who ties knots in her electric
cords to reduce her monthly utility bill.

Since then, this social psychologist at the University of Texas at
Arlington has collected a series of equally fanciful anecdotes. They
include the woman who concluded that NASA faked pictures of the moon
landings. Because her television couldn't receive signals transmitted by
stations in New York, she reasoned that it certainly hadn't picked up live
broadcasts from the moon.

What most scientists fail to realize, observes sociologist Susan Carol Losh
of Florida State University in Tallahassee, is how many people seriously
misunderstand or consciously reject many of the basic precepts and findings
of science. In the United States, she observes, their numbers are large
and growing -- currently approaching half the population. "Many of these
people are likely to be your neighbors," influencing social mores and
community policies.

Eve says that although the scientific community has traditionally written
most of these people off as "ignorant, stupid, or mentally deranged," his
data argue that misconceptions about science often trace to deeply held
belief systems through which an individual interprets the world.

Losh sees the evidence of this in her ongoing analyses of nearly 40 local
religious congregations, roughly half of them spiritual home to Christian
fundamentalists. For these fundamentalists, she says, the way to interpret
the world "is to quote the appropriate chapter and verse in the Bible,"
rather than to form hypotheses and test them.

Other types of doctrines also pose a challenge to science, according to a
panel of researchers at the American Association for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS) annual meeting earlier this year. Some radical feminists,
blacks, and others, see the science as a means by which white men have
asserted their dominance in Western society.

This attack on the legitimacy of science is not idle rhetoric, he contends.
Its adherents "have infiltrated most universities, and in some cases taken
them over," he told Science News. The result is that people who study
electrons, gravity, and other invisible entities or forces are dismissed as
building careers on "nothing more than socially constructed fictions,"
Holton explains.

Rejection of scientific truths and logic is also eroding support for the
teaching of critical thinking and objective analyses -- the bedrock of
basic research, maintains philosopher Paul Kurtz of the State University of
New York at Buffalo. Unless the problem is addressed quickly, he says, the
United States may find itself unable to compete in an ever more compicated
technology-driven global economy.

Such concerns are premature, says political scientist Jon D. Miller, vice
president of the Chicago Academy of Sciences.

His new survey data, just unveiled in separate reports issued by the
National Science Foundation and the European Union, indicate
that, overall, the US public not only accepts the validity of science but
happily supports its inquiries, even those that have no obvious, near-term
benefits.

One point on which all of the researchers agree is that scientists need to
work at effectively winning over critics who challenge the validity of
science.

Moreover, their attitudes cannot be ascribed to ignorance. Many of the
Wiccan-pagans that Eve polled were very well educated.

On issues associated with traditional family values and morality, the
creationist and Wiccan-pagan groups represented polar extremes. Attitudes
toward social issues rooted in biomedical science also divided the two
groups. Wiccan-pagans, for example, were farmore receptive than
creationists to genetic engineering and fetal transplants.

Creationists and Wiccan-pagans came together, though, in their opposition
to aspects of modern science. While it's hardly surprising that more than
80 percent of the creationists believe Earth is not at least 4 billion
years old, the survey indicated that more than 60 percent of the largely
noncreationist Wiccan-pagans shared this view. Roughly one-quarter of both
groups thought science causes spiritual decline, and some 40 percent of
each said scientists possess dangerous powers.

Science classes in schools have served as the most important means of
imparting a basic understanding of science and technology and the reasoning
skills that underpin them. Eve observes that the people he has polled were
exposed to such teaching, yet in many cases chose to reject or ignore it.
He cites one fundamentalist Christian on his campus, for instance, who
correctly answered questions about the human fossil record on an archeology
exam, only to point out at the bottom of the test sheet: "Of course, I
don't believeany of this. I believe in the Bible."

Holton, in contrast, blames educators for much of today's antipathy to or
misunderstandings about science. To begin with, he says, elementary and
high school science teaching tends to intimidate students by making
subjects abstract, imposing, and inaccessible. The reason, he says, is
that often "teachers themselves are intimidated by the subject" and poorly
trained to teach science.

While the situation might be ameliorated somewhat among those who continue
their education, he points out that "it's only in about 30 percent of US
colleges that you have to take even a single course in science or math."
Even Harvard, he notes, will graduate nonscience majors with just one
physical and one biological or social science class.

Holton also worries about the insidious creep of postmodernism into science
education. He notes, for instance, that a 1992 draft of the new National
Science Standards (SN: 2/3/96, p. 72) announced that they would be "based
on the postmodernism view" -- one that "questions the objectivity of
observation and the truth of scientific knowledge." Though the final draft
excised these phrases, Holton says it still advocates that science students
construct a personal meaning from observations rather than search for
universal truths.

Viewed through this interpretive filter, he maintains, "Madame Curie did
not discover radium, she 'constructed' it."

Religious beliefs also have served as a potent barrier to the acceptance of
more circumscribed areas of science, observes anthropologist Eugenie C.
Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education in
El Cerito, CA. This nonprofit clearinghouse is working to keep evolution
in public schools and creationism out.

To many fundamentalist Christians, she observes, accepting evolution places
an individual on a slippery slope from God's word to sin. "So by fighting
evolution, they're saving souls," she says. "We on the proevolution side
have a far tougher row to hoe in terms of motivation."

Miller, whose study compares scientific literacy in 15 industrialized
nations, argues that creationism "is a peculiarity of the American
landscape." His data indicate that US creationists often accept some
aspects of science that do not address biological evolution. In fact, he
suspects that the adamancy of belief in creationism traces to the litmus
test that many US fundamentalist sects use for membership: literal
acceptance of the biblical account in Genesis of God's weeklong creation of
the universe and everything in it some 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.

"Those people who reject evolution tell us at the same time that there are
thousands of planets in the universe on which life might have developed --
which is not a Genesis point of view," says Miller. "They will also agree
with the statement that the continents on which we live have been moving in
their locations for millions of years." This popular version of plate
tectonics also violates the biblical timetable. The good news, Miller
says, is that 80 percent of US adults, including many creationists, believe
the benefits of science outweigh its harms.

While Losh accepts Miller's data, she does not share his generally rosy
view of what they imply for scientific literacy and appreciation.

What fundamentalists really like, her results suggest, is not science but
the fruits of science, such as vaccines against infectious diseases,
cleaner water, and especially technology. Her studies indicate that they
don't welcome the untethered inquiry that led to those fruits -- and that
scares her.

Creationists prefer thinking that is geared toward accepting the word of
church-approved authorities without question, Losh finds. This approach to
learning may produce good technologists, she argues, "but it doesn't tend
to generate good science."

A flurry of recent popular feminist books has interpreted the development
of Western science in terms of male chauvinism and aggression against
women, notes chemist Noretta Koertge, a historian of science at Indiana
University in Bloomington.

At the AAAS meeting, she cited one radical feminist interpretation of why
fluid dynamics matured as a research discipline much later than mechanics
of solids. Men were more comfortable working with rigid environments,
which reflect their "sex organs that protrude and become rigid," Koertge
recounted. In contrast, early scientists associated fluidity with women
and their menstrual blood and vaginal secretions. "In the same way that
women are erased within masculinist theories and language, existing only as
not-men, so fluids had been erased from science, existing only as not-
solids," she explained.

Koertge worries that propounding such machismo interpretations of science
may lead women to associate any problems they have in understanding
physics, for instance, with the philosophy of a textbook writer or
theorist. That could prove a major disservice if the real problem were,
say, a weak grounding in math. Moreover, she argues, this sort of feminism
can alienate women from science by characterizing its logic-based method of
inquiry as "incompatible with women's ways of knowing."

The research community needs to recognize that whole segments of society
today may be unreceptive to all or parts of science, Eve says. Until
scientists understand why, he says, "we won't make much progress gaining
political support for science or see much of an improvement in science
literacy."

In other words, he argues, "we need to be anthropologists in our own land,"
exploring believers' cultures from their own points of view.

Many might feel more inclined to accept the explanations offered by science
if they felt that doing so wouldn't subsume their religion. The job of the
scientific community, then, may be to find ways of showing how science and
faith coexist, says Scott.

It's a topic Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan tackles in his new
book, The Demon-Haunted World (New York: Random House). In it, he argues
that "science is not only compatible with spirituality, it is a profound
source of spirituality."

Science is not religion, however, and scientists need to make it clear that
they have never meant science to be portrayed as such, Scott maintains.

Indeed, Eve observes, "Science can't tell you what the meaning of life is,
why we're here, or how to handle bereavement or guilt. Those things are
for theology."